Day 3: Bof: Linux on HP-PA/RISC

Matthew Wilcox formerly from Linuxcare now works for HP and he told us a bit about the HP-PA/RISC linux work that is being done

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Matthew had a hard time finding sources for Mach and the Linux port done by Apple, and doesn't really like Mach anyway, so he decided to do a native port.

The port now boots on most PA/RISC machines, including the most popular one: the 712. Some early servers are a bit more problematic to support.
One problem is cache coherency, and with some 2.4 code this was achieved on some machines, but some older, more hesoteric ones, are quite hard to support.

With recent code from HP, linux on the HP platform is now almost on par with HPUX.

Matthew gave us more technical details on how the port was made. A few of the things he mentionned where that

Because there is no equivalent of xchg on the HP platform, Matthew explained the problems they had implementing spinlocks with the ldcw instruction.
HPUX is one of the few architectures where the stack grows upwards, which is something else fun to work with.

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2001/01/28 (15:35): Version 1.0